WHO'S YOUR DADDY? — Sharon Mark Cohen

When I spoke with Crystal from Summit, Mississippi, with her cute Southern accent, she politely referred to me as “ma’am.” “Yes, ma’am,” she answered question after question. Crystal may be my first cousin once removed. It’s a bit of a story.

It all started in Jackson, Louisiana, around 1979. On January 7 that year, my cousin Donald Mark married a woman named Donna. Let’s go back a ways. I’ve never met my cousin Donald, three and a half years my senior, or his two sisters. The only contact we had was very sporadically via U.S. mail or over the telephone.

When I was in high school, my father’s sister, my Aunt Fannie, asked me to start a correspondence with my cousin Donald, stationed in the military in Vietnam. The reply letters from Donald were “all-telling” in that they revealed that he knew nothing about his father’s family in New Jersey. His Jewish roots were glaringly a tabula rosa.

Donald, or Donnie, grew up in Pineville, Louisiana, the son of my father’s brother, a Jew, and a Christian mother. His parents met during WWII when my uncle was in the military, stationed in Louisiana. My uncle never again visited the family in New Jersey while his parents were alive. He returned probably over a dozen years later to seek medical treatment for a bad back, a residual of his war years. That was when I was under ten.

If memory serves me correctly, my uncle visited twice more. On one occasion, his wife was with him. Those visits were in the 1970s.

Here we are about 40 years later, Crystal from Mississippi sent out a couple of S.O.S.’s on various social media platforms, trying to get in contact in hopes of finding the whereabouts of her elusive dad. After thinking about it long and hard, finally, I conceded and called. Crystal did not pick up. Another busy week went by before I texted her a linking picture. Written on the back is “Donnie’s wife.” With that intro, Crystal called me back immediately. My iPhone shows that we spoke for one hour and thirty-one minutes. We had a lot of catching up to do.

Crystal impressed me with being very family-oriented. She freely offered a synopsis of her forty years and was sure to say even if she cannot get in touch with Donnie, she’s happy to have contact with someone in her large unknown family. “Family,” she plainly said, “is everything to me.”

For a quick recap, from the time she was five months old, Donnie was out of his only child’s life. For a part of her infancy, she and her parents lived with her grandparents, my aunt and uncle.

Before her marriage, Crystal called Donnie. She requested that he sign her marriage license and walk her down the aisle. He did neither, claiming that Crystal was too young to marry. She was 17 when she married in 1998. Three sons later, she celebrates 24 years of marriage on March 24, this year.

The year after she married, when Crystal became pregnant with her eldest of three boys, now 22, she called Donnie one more time, wanting to share her joy. He was angry and told her never to contact him again.

While I couldn’t fill in many blanks for Crystal, there were many short notes on my family tree program. They showed how hard I tried over the years to determine if Crystal warranted a place on our family tree. For all these years, while waiting for confirmation that she was Donnie’s daughter, I kept her name and date of birth listed as a child of Donnie and her mother, Donna.

My notes on my Aunt Ruby’s page, Donnie’s page, and those of his two sisters show that I never stopped trying to get to the bottom of this and find out if Crystal was Donnie’s child. Each contact with Donnie's nuclear family offered an unsettling reply.

More than one relative indicated that DNA testing showed Crystal was not Donnie’s child. His older sister told me that she felt her mother protected Donnie. She thought that Crystal was his child. Donnie's younger sister threw a wrench in, saying that one of their cousins on her mother’s side may have been the father.

At the end of our lengthy conversation, in which I unabashedly read and discussed with Crystal the various notes I kept about her paternity, she texted me a picture of Donna and Donnie at prom and another at their wedding. Also, she sent a photograph of my Aunt Ruby, probably taken around the time Crystal was born.

In return, I emailed Donnie’s picture, in uniform, during the Vietnam War. Crystal responded that she never knew he was ever in the military, let-alone in a war zone.

There’s much Crystal doesn’t know but deserves to know. She said she enjoys reading and will have to look up information about “Jewish,” because she knows nothing about it. She sheepishly asked if it was something like the Amish, which she only knows about a little bit. I’ll have plenty of reading for her when I pull out the paper files of letters from my Aunt Ruby and the correspondence from my cousin Donnie when he was in Nam.

Crystal says she is very close with her mother, who has never lied to her. Her mother told her that Donnie is her father, plus Crystal’s family name was “Mark,” the name is on her birth certificate.

It appears that Donnie has not denied paternity when speaking with Crystal, but he refuses to be a part of her life. My recommendation to Crystal was to have DNA testing. She agreed that she would most likely go that route, and this way, no one will ever be able to deny that she is Donnie’s daughter.

There will be no question, just a lot of missing answers to 40 years of family history. Unraveling the puzzle will begin with the four very descriptive letters I saved from my cousin Donnie. They were handwritten and signed by him when he was serving in Vietnam.